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The astonishing sailing skills of the people who navigated their way around the Pacific 4000 years ago were thousands of years ahead of the Vikings, Portuguese and Spaniards.
Their epic Pacific voyage, considered one of the world's greatest migrations, will be shown in detail for the first time next week when Auckland Museum opens its $100 million extension.
The museum said the exploration and settling of the Pacific 3000-4000 years ago set up the ancestors of today's Pacific peoples as the world's first truly maritime people.
The exhibition, Vaka Moana, would show how navigation skills, developed by observing the sea and sky, allowed them to range across vast expanses of Pacific Ocean thousands of years before other sea-faring cultures such as the Vikings, Portuguese and Spaniards made their first big ocean voyages.
Exhibition development manager Penny Morison said it would also show how the extremities of Polynesia were the last places to be settled on Earth.
Vaka Moana would outline how Spanish, British and French expeditions reacted to the widely scattered Polynesian peoples and present the visitors' recorded impressions of the technology they encountered.
The exhibition uses several hundred objects from the Auckland Museum's collection and elsewhere, including rare carvings and a full-size inter-island voyaging canoe, graphics and multimedia technology.
"But the story is the hero," said Ms Morison.
"Everything else is focused on illustrating that."
- NZPA
